Utah lowered its DUI limit. Will other states follow?

Friday

If you’re a 200-pound man, it takes about four drinks in an hour to register a .08 blood-alcohol content level and be deemed legally intoxicated.

Except if you’re in Utah.

A new law that went into effect Dec. 30 in the Beehive State lowered the legal BAC to .05 from .08. That 200-pound man is now legally drunk in Utah after consuming about two drinks. A 100-pound woman could be looking at a DUI charge after a single shot of alcohol.

Four other states — Delaware, Hawaii, New York and Washington — have entertained legislation in the past two years that would qualify a .05 BAC reading as legally drunk.

In 2013, the National Transportation Safety Board — the U.S. government agency tasked with investigating civil transportation crashes — recommended lowering BAC levels to .05.

Proponents point to studies that show corresponding decreases in traffic fatalities after adoption of .05 levels, a threshold that other countries have adopted.

For instance, fatal crashes decreased 18 percent in Queensland and 8 percent in New South Wales after those Australian states dropped their BAC limits to .05 from .08.

A University of Chicago study found that a .05 limit would prevent 11 percent of fatal crashes in the U.S. involving alcohol and save 1,800 lives every year. In 2016, nearly 10,500 people — nearly 30 per day — died in the U.S. in crashes caused by an alcohol-impaired driver.

Heather Geronemus of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., vice chairwoman of Mothers Against Drunk Driving’s national board of directors, said there is plenty of “evidence” to support cutting the legal BAC limit, but the organization is not pushing the effort because it stands little chance of nationwide acceptance.

Utah’s plan met with opposition from some state lawmakers and the state’s restaurant, skiing and snowboarding industries, all of them concerned it could hurt tourism.

“It’s pretty unlikely that states will go after it,” said Geronemus, whose father Dr. Robert Geronemus was killed in 2009 by a drunk driver in Miami. “For what we’ve seen, there’s not much appetite for it.”

How many more people would be arrested if the legal BAC limit was dropped to .05 is unclear. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 1,800 drivers were involved in fatal crashes during 2015 in which a BAC level between .01 and .07 was detected.

Early on New Year’s Day, a 21-year-old Wyoming man became the first person jailed under Utah’s new law. According to an arrest report, the man had a .059 BAC, a reading that around 24 hours earlier would not have put him in custody.